Sustainable practices of the large-scale textile firms in Ghana

Abstract

This paper sought to assess sustainable practices employing the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) concept among Ghana's large-scale textile firms, with a focus on their production processes. This aims at ensuring adherence to sustainable practices, standards and certification and best global practices to improve their production to maximize returns. This study is based on quantitative research approach and employs descriptive statistics and reliability of individual firms in assessing their production sustainability with standards and certifications indicators. The descriptive statistics involve the usage of mean and standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis and correlation for examining normality and reliability diagnostics for all the variables studied. Theoretical and empirical evidence on sustainability show adherence of standards and certification coupled with best sustainable practices among offshore textile firms. However, although domestic textile firms are adhering to the norms of GSA, there are gaps in the implementation and adherence to global sustainable design and production methods. The research was limited to the use of TBL performance indicators. It must be noted that several factors such as type of industry, company size, local regulations, interested party's efforts among others could be used as moderators. Application of standardization and green certification in the operations of the textile firms will help address sustainability challenges by optimizing the TBL. This will lead to efficient utilization of water, energy, chemicals, materials, etc., as well as waste reduction and improvement of health and safety of workers. This study addresses safety and health issues confronting domestic textile firms through provision of safe and healthy working environment to prevent work-related injury and ill health among current and future workers and the community. Empirical and theoretical reviews show a significant number of researches on sustainability. Evidently, most of such studies focus on the manufacturing sector with the global textile industry receiving its share. It is also observed that the domestic textile industry has also been overly researched. However, it appears that empirical and theoretical gaps exist with respect to issues of sustainability of the Ghana Textile Industry which is the focus of this study.